FMAHealth Releases Strategic Goals. Family Medicine for America’s Health has released a set of campaign goals for transforming the nation’s primary care system. These goals reflect a vision and approach to modernize family medicine and primary care that were outlined in a September special edition of Family Medicine, the official journal of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. The goals are:
1. Access: Increase patient accessibility to their primary care team, including remote access to patient records, electronic communication with their care team and availability after hours.
2. Engagement: Encourage every practice to have a patient advisory council or similar mechanism to facilitate meaningful and ongoing patient engagement.
3. Transparency: Increase transparency in pricing of health care services and educate patients to better understand the cost of care.
4. Integration: Integrate public and mental health into the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and add care managers, health coaches and population health professionals to the primary care team. Incorporate training to practice in a team-based setting into graduate medical education.
5. Recruitment: Support policies that drive at least 40 percent of medical students toward primary care specialties with the goal of increasing the number of primary care physicians by a minimum of 52,000 by 2025.
6. Payment: Sunset fee-for-service payment in primary care. Work with public and private payers to adopt a uniform and simplified model of comprehensive payment that encourages front-end investment in expanded practice infrastructure and technology, rewards Triple Aim goals (better care, better health and lower costs) and supports broad, team-based care. Support efforts to drive HHS goal of having 85 percent of Medicare payments tied to quality or value by 2016 and 90 percent by 2018.
Denver and Detroit Are Next Stops for City Tour. The Health is Primary campaign will be in Denver on October 2 and Detroit on October 21. The events will feature local experts who are working to transform primary care delivery. Learn more about city tour events here.
FMAHealth Engages AFP Chapters. FMAHealth met with the AAFP Chapter Leadership at their Chapter Executive Leadership Program on September 8. The bulk of the time was spent in conversations centered around the work of the six Tactic Teams. Chapter leaders weighed in on areas of alignment between the goals of their chapters and FMAHealth goals and discussed ways to take further actions in support of aligned goals. Chapters came away with summaries of what each Tactic Team is doing and what chapters can do to support the national effort while moving their local agenda forward at the same time.
Join Others Who Have Walked through the Engagement Portal. As of early September, more than one hundred individuals have stepped up to help the strategy implementation get real work done on the ground. The engagement portal is one of the ways in which the six Tactic Teams are identifying and on-boarding volunteers to accomplish work that those working locally around the country can do better than anyone else. And it’s not only family physicians, chairs and faculty, medical students and residents who are joining FMAHealth. One Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) from Illinois, in her statement of interest, said, “Being on a local hospital board in a rural community reinforces the current struggle for recruitment and retainment of competent primary care providers… I recognize the only way to improve the health of America is to build a strong primary care infrastructure.”
Please continue to let your networks know about the engagement portal. Here is the link:
